Millie Thompson, who died of brain cancer at the age of 58, has played an active role in British art over the past two decades, both as a member of the artist group BANK and as an independent painter, writer and performer. Through all her work, in touch, lines and words, she conveyed a consistent sense of anger.
BANK emerged in the early 1990s, when contemporary art was beginning to be celebrated as perhaps the most fashionable art form in the UK, especially London. The group’s frenetic and provocative activity includes proofreading self-aggrandizing and cryptic gallery press releases from BANK tabloids with headlines such as ‘All Galleries Owned by the Rich – Shock’, It even includes the FaxBack service to send faxes with a back cover. In red pencil.
As Thompson said in a 2013 interview, “I think BANK sensed the next era. and Tony were starting to attract bigger prices.Cragg and Richard Wentworth did it in the 1980s [and] The stupidity of “Cool Britannia” hung on everyone. I had a feeling that something was going to change, and I think I was working on it without realizing it. ”
A core member of BANK from 1994 to 2003, Thompson moved from the topic of working collectively on apparently cohesive exhibitions and happenings to enjoying painting alone. Her 2016 manifesto, “I choose painting,” parodied the male artist’s grandiose statement, yet was sincere in its content and explained its potential. What Thompson believed remained in the medium. “My thoughts are just escapism, simplicity and sensuality.”
Thompson’s paintings contain lines that are decidedly relaxed, but still decisive, as she did in real life. The graphical lines drawn with paint bubble lightly and make you feel the sensibility of everyday life.
Works such as Noah Playing the Flute (2018) and Helian in the Garden (2016) depict middle-aged women relaxing and having fun. Painted in a way that is more unstudied than she hastily puts on make-up, the subject is careless both inside and out, seemingly unconcerned about remaining attractive to anyone but herself.
Scuba Sauvage Azure Bleu (2021) shows a woman painted on vintage linen in various media and adorned with various props. For The Moon, the Sea, and the Matriarch (2019), the committee ‘Celebrated menopausal, elderly and middle-aged women’s joys, anguish, cellulite, and desires’ at Timespan, a cultural organization in Helmsdale, northeast Scotland. , Thompson exhibited her series of cougar paintings, launched performances by women in the community, and, with perfumer Eliza Douglas, created a perfume collection, Shatavari, with three scents: Proposition, Invisible and Volatile. is created.
Born in Bloomsbury, central London, to Susan (née Bramall), who became a dress designer, and Julian Thompson, an architectural model maker for Orb Arup, Millie grew up in Maida Vale with her sister, Eleanor. She attended Pimlico Comprehensive School (now Pimlico Academy) in 1982, where she worked as a theatrical prop maker and gardener for a year before she attended the Art Foundation Course at the Central School of Art and Design. Did.
She earned a BA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art. There she was particularly influenced by the sculptor Bruce McLean, who had just arrived as her tutor. While there, she rode her motorbike, wore her gear in full on her leather bike, and was seen as her provocateur by her fellow students. She graduated in 1989.
Bedwell and Russell have been showing together since 1991, taking their name from their first show at the disused Barclays Bank in Lewisham, South London. In 1993, the two, along with David Burroughs and Andrew Williamson, invited Thompson, whom Russell had met at Slade, to participate in a big painting show at King’s Cross Junkyard. She obliged and became a key part of what would become a more defined group (Burrows left in 1995).
BANK has curated around 20 shows, from its base in Shoreditch’s Underwood Street (later renamed Gallery Phu Phu) to the Tate Modern, ICA and Whitechapel Galleries. Approximately 35 editions of BANK’s tabloid newssheets have been published. And to galleries such as Stephen Friedman and Green Naphtali, he sent over 300 press revisions of his releases back. Fundamentally opposed to the mystification of artistic practice, Burroughs wrote in Art Monthly in 1999 that the group “discussed the other histories of modernism, the denial of the avant-garde and the provocation of bourgeois art… [a refusal] To make their artwork for art institutions.”
The last show by BANK’s core three members was in 2002 at the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery. Bedwell and Thompson last played shows together in 2003 at the London Store and Chicago’s Suburban. Included in the Tate Collection, BANK’s archives, including copies of tabloids and FaxBack.
With a master’s degree in painting from the Royal College of Art since 2000 and teaching art at Goldsmiths, University of London until 2021, Thompson continues to influence generations of emerging artists.
In 2002, as a member of BANK, he received the Paul Hamlin Foundation Award. Personally, in 2005, I won the Sargent Prize at the British School of Rome. Her solo exhibitions include Late Entry at her Peer UK in London (2008) and Savoir Faire at her Focal Point Gallery in Southend, Essex (2009). Her work was included at last year’s London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Thompson is bequeathed to her husband, Robert Jacobs, whom she married in 2019, along with her mother, father, and sister.
